1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to fire protection systems, and specifically to a fire protection system including a barrier that deploys from a modular kit and rapidly inflates to form a large barrier to provide a whole-house protection for residential dwellings in case of wildfire or provide heat exposure protection from a next door house or structure fire.
2. Description of the Background
Volunteer fire companies and municipal fire departments are largely responsible for putting out fires whenever they occur in any community that they serve. However, there are many rural towns, especially in dry areas, where service is not practicable. In such areas there is a great risk of forest fires spreading from home to home. Consequently, as a practical matter for those who live in the back country, fire fighting is left up to the individual property owners. For small fires extinguishers work well, but for larger fires they are simply inadequate. The typical approach to saving one's house from a full scale spreading fire is to pre-wet the house with hose-water. Statistically, this level of effort is miniscule and is often unsuccessful. Even if successful in preventing spread, there is still a significant risk of structural damage resulting from heat exposure due to the neighboring fire.
Thus, there remains a need for a device to help private home owners protect their homes from spreading wildfires when they are not adequately served by volunteer fire companies or municipal fire departments.
Past efforts at accomplishing the foregoing include U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,941 to Lokken, which discloses a wettable polymer blanket for protecting items from fire, including houses and mobile homes.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,944,114 to Farley discloses a number of devices for constraining wildfires. One device comprises a fire-resistant sheet which may be draped over trees or structures or may be put on the ground to form a barrier to the fire. A plurality of these devices may be aligned at the perimeter of a fire to establish a barrier.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,860,251 to Gleich discloses a fire-resistant flexible dome apparatus for covering and protecting buildings, goods, livestock, persons and other objects from a fire, especially wildfires. The apparatus is rapidly deployed from a container, preferably located on the roof of the building to be protected.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,829,200 to Jones et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,395 to McQuirk disclose fire retardant blankets stowed on a building roof structure, with cables that extract the blankets for deployment over the structure.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,748,072 to Wang and U.S. Pat. No. 5,423,482 to Hitchcock disclose automatic systems for protecting a house or a building from fire. A computer detects a fire and automatically unfolds a fire protecting cover to isolate a house from the outside.
Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,608,992 to Floyd discloses a fire isolation tarp for a free standing structure.
Unfortunately, the foregoing and other known prior art devices are not fully capable of rapid deployment over a home or building when confronted with an approaching wildfire, or are relatively bulky, permanent installations that are inconvenient to use, nor flexible enough to be used by the fire department to provide heat exposure protection from the random next door house fire.
There remains a need for a pre-engineered, pre-fabricated, portable, modular wildfire protection system that inflates from a compact footprint to a full-scale barrier for rapid deployment by a single person or firemen.